One day, shocked to
discover how the white pigment in my paintings had yellowed, I resigned myself
to taking them all back and restoring them to their original colours – a
Herculean task, particularly long and tedious. Plunged into this gloomy exercise,
I found my thoughts wandering down the most unexpected avenues, to-ing and
fro-ing in time, with no idea who was controlling what anymore.

When my ramblings finally brought me to my abstract painting of 15th
March 1988, with its practically infinite division of construction, its
multiplicity of brushstrokes of all shades and sizes, it seemed to me that the
difficulties of restoring such a work were practically insurmountable. I decided
to abandon the project. But, without really knowing why, I left it on view in
the studio, even though I literally couldn't stand to look at the dirty
white-yellow colour. Several months later, having completed my work on all the
other canvasses, I began to feel challenged by this last one, this recalcitrant,
unqualifiable thing, which had failed, and left me betrayed by poor quality
paint.

I decided that after all the result was the only thing that counted in
this trade, and that time spent had nothing to do with it. I was going to try to
do a partial restoration on a limited section of the canvas, just to see. I
certainly did see something. So much so that
I had to ask myself : here's something really unexpected, now what's
happening ? I had discovered another work – and yet it was the same painting
– in the restored section of the canvas. Was my mind playing tricks on me ? It
wouldn't have been the first time with this style of painting ! And then I
came to the most extraordinary conclusion that I have ever come to about any of
my works : namely that I was not yet ready to paint that picture, it was
something which I would perhaps be capable of doing later, but not yet, it was a
canvas which was maybe located somewhere in my future, and even that was not
sure ! It was devastating : by just whitening surfaces which should have
remained white, surely all I had done was to restore the canvas to its original
state, that seemed to be logically obvious.

But in fact what had happened was that my previous mental state (it was a
painting from 1988 !) had suddenly, in 2001, while contemplating this work,
become my possible future, virtual even, and with no reasonable guarantee. I
needed a lifeline, the ground was caving in beneath my feet ! My only
consolation was that many of our contemporary physicists consider themselves to
be in a similar situation with respect to the irrational and inexplicable nature
of quantum physics.

So, my perception of the situation suddenly became totally different and, once again,
I tried to understand what was happening, looking to science for some
assistance, though only in a metaphorical way, since as a non-scientific artist,
this was the only type of enlightenment I could hope for. It was the same
approach I have used up to now concerning the notions of uncertainty, of
complementarity of " the only thing which is real is the real which is
observed ", which seem to me to be common to quantum physics and abstract
art, and which I have talked about in previous writings (1).

The artist and the scientist in fact both start from the metaphor, and frequently
the same one, but whereas the artist uses the metaphor to enter directly into
the creation of his work, the scientist will first have to transit through
analogy, that powerful, everyday tool for reflection, leading to the development
of a theory, and finally, to the validation of the theory, by experimentation.
It is out of the question for the artist to confer on his metaphor the value of
analogy, and he is not obliged to provide proof of anything at all.

So, in this search to which my painting from 1988 beckons me, it is again time which
I am questioning, as I have already done incidentally, (2), as if this
experience had already sent me on a strange return journey. I observe, in this
respect, that two themes have provoked scientific research on this subject :
time travel in the sense of general relativity, and the application of Schrödinger's
equation to the prediction of the behaviour of the wave function in quantum
physics. In this connection, Hawking talks about the " wormhole "
(3) between two levels of space-time, between the past and the future. This is
the pattern I experienced in the evolution of my creative process.

To the extent to which the mental field of artistic creation is without limit –
and frighteningly so – I feel obliged, in order to facilitate things, to make
a straight choice with regard to the shapes, the colours, the shades, the
writing, the rhythm, the material, the visual connotations for myself and for
" the others ", the general spirit of the work. And it is this
choice which will condition years of work, of successive repetition, sometimes
leading to a kind of lassitude induced by routine, to the point of exhaustion,
leading to the feeling "I've no more painting left in me".

And yet, one always manages to make progress somehow, and
realises that on the way, one has left new ideas dormant, new ideas which
haven't been given their chance chance. So it would seem that my 1988 painting
has remained at a kind of stagnation point all these years, during which the
work of the mind has continued in the background, waiting for its resurgence in
2001. But was this resurgence inevitable ?